The Mountain Meadows Massacre- Hate

    This one act is probably the most horrendous act committed by the Church. It is also the one that the Church is most sorrowful about. Before I get into the anger that surrounds this event in history, I will tell you the story.


    The year was 1857. The Pioneers had arrived years before, and the state was full of small towns and cities. It was hard to get through Utah without running into some sort of settlement, making Utah a good way to travel to California, because there were several Mormons willing to trade with travelers. Many companies chose to head through Utah. One of them was the Francher-Baker company.

    The majority of the Francher-Baker company was made up of mostly families from Arkansas, a place not very friendly with Mormons in general. There are several recordings of protesting and antagonizing settlements (most of them while they were drunk), and even one circumstance where men rode on horses down the street, waving a gun, and saying "THIS IS THE GUN THAT KILLED JOSEPH SMITH." Not so nice actions, eh. It doesn't excuse what happened next.

    Several leaders of local militia in the area disliked the company, and once they heard of the antagonizings, they formulated a horrible plan to kill every single one of the Arkansasans.  The first step in the plan was that they poisoned (not fatally poisoned, just sick poisoned) several Piute Indian Wells, their main source of water. They then blamed it on the company, and promised the Indians that they would help them.

   So they next armed the Indians, and led them to Mountain Meadows, the place the Francher-Baker company had set up camp. The Indians sieged the camp for five days, while the Mormon militia leaders sat aside and watched. After five days, the Indians bailed on the Mormons, because they had lost too many braves. So, the Mormons pretended to have driven the Indians off. They separated the men from the women, put the children in a cart, and told them to follow them back to the settlement.

   They didn't make it far. When they had only gone a short way, the Mormon soldiers turned, and fired upon the men and women. Some of the braves also returned to help. They killed every single one of them. They also fired upon all of the children who might remember the incident. The only survivors were 17 small children.

   Do you know what is ironic about the whole thing. It happened on September 11. 9/11. The same day of the Terrorist Attack. Both of them came down to the same things: Hate.

   Obviously, Terrorists hate us and want to kill us, but why would Mormons go so far as to murder a few hundred people in cold blood? I suppose we will never know the motivations behind it, but a lot of it was hate. Hate of Mormons, hate of non-mormons, hate of the killers of Joseph Smith, hate of the people of Arkansas. Hate leads to very rash and violent actions, even ones as extreme as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

   I think we need to avoid hate at all costs. Contention is never the answer. Forgiveness should be a major part of our life, and being forgiving is opposite of being hateful.